there were fifteen thousand of them, was worth any dozen Achimota graduates”—of which Nkrumah was one.14
Joining the colony’s women in the CPP were similarly significant groups of youth, farmers, and workers. As with M. N. Tetteh, who joined the Nkrumahist wing of the UGCC in 1948 and later the CPP, the Gold Coast’s young people tended to be attracted to the excitement surrounding the new party. In time, they began their own deliberations on what the CPP and its message meant and promised in terms of the prospects for their own futures. As with other constituencies, this included schooling and employment following their education as well as personal and social independence from their elders. Others like Kofi Duku—who, after leaving school in the late 1940s, had bounced from one location to another in the western and central Gold Coast before settling in Accra—spoke in an interview of the sense of community and belonging that the party provided him amidst the din of the postwar colony.15 Meanwhile, farmers turned to the CPP out of opposition to many of the colonial government’s agricultural policies. For cocoa farmers specifically, the onslaught of swollen shoot disease—a fatal virus infecting cocoa trees—in the colony’s oldest cocoa-growing regions, followed by the government’s decision to cut down blighted trees, threatened the livelihood of thousands.16 The CPP, for its part, with its vocal opposition to the government’s forced eradication campaign, appeared to be a means by which the affected farmers as well as those who feared the disease’s spread could gain a voice on the national stage. As a result, historian Francis Danquah notes, farmers’ groups had by late 1950 begun sponsoring CPP candidates in preparation for the 1951 election.17
In seeking to address the concerns of nearly all of its major constituencies, the CPP positioned the colonial government as unable and unwilling to meet its obligations to its subject population. Indirect rule and similar methods of governance, the party contended, were specifically designed to leave Gold Coasters, as with other colonial peoples, in a state of dependence and unprepared for the modern world.18 The day-to-day mission of the CPP, then, at least from the perspective of the party’s local emissaries, was to establish the social and institutional framework necessary to both meet the needs and expectations of its varying constituencies and prepare these constituencies with the tools required of a modern society. When, for instance, a group of secondary school students in Cape Coast were expelled for striking in opposition to the 1948 arrest of Nkrumah and other UGCC leaders, the Nkrumahist wing of the UGCC began establishing a set of schools of its own, catering to the colony’s politically active youth. The first of these schools opened in Cape Coast in July 1948. Over the next several years, the Nkrumahist wing—over the objections of the UGCC’s broader leadership—and later the CPP would found one to two dozen similar institutions throughout the southern Gold Coast.19
For the CPP, education served both an ideological and a practical purpose. No other issue more fundamentally represented the hopes and ambitions of both the individual and the nation as a whole than education. To the CPP, though, colonial education was a sphere deeply fraught with contradiction. As articulated in 1949 by the Nkrumah-founded Accra Evening News, it was where “you see Imperialism almost at its worst.” Hailing access to schools as “the greatest liberating force,” the newspaper chastised the colonial government for what it considered to be the rationing of education. The most notable method by which this was done was through the imposition of an array of school fees on students and their families so that only a limited number of students could afford to attend. Relatedly, the Evening News also questioned the government’s decision not to make schooling compulsory for all of the Gold Coast’s children, especially at the primary level. It was these types of decisions, the newspaper insisted, that explained a literacy rate in the colony of only ten percent, and a situation where both parents and children were desperate for greater access to schooling at all levels. “Parents want to send their children to school,” the Evening News argued, “but cannot get admission for them. Children cry to go to school but cry in vain, for there is no accommodation for them. In the face of this the Education Department is absolutely helpless and hopeless in trying to cope with the position. It draws up a Ten Year Educational Development Plan and the whole thing is a complete washout.”20
Following the CPP’s initial electoral victory, the new government thus catapulted education to the top of its legislative agenda, announcing in early 1951 its plans for the implementation of fee-free primary education in the colony beginning in January 1952.21 As detailed in the government’s report on educational development, “The aim of the course [primary school education] will be to provide a sound foundation for citizenship with permanent literacy in both English and the vernacular. On completion of such a primary course,” the report continued, “children will be ready to proceed to one of varying types of course in the next stage of their education, according to their aptitudes and abilities.”22 Over the next several years, the CPP’s waiving of (most) school fees led to a rapid increase in enrollments in the colony’s primary schools. In the six years between 1951 and Ghana’s 1957 independence, for instance, enrollments at the primary and middle school levels soared in the colony from approximately 220,000 students to more than 570,000. The number of primary schools also grew, rising from approximately 1,000 in 1951 to over 3,400 in 1957, while the number of middle schools (senior-primary schools pre-1952) went from 600 to 900.23 Additionally, increases at the primary and middle school levels spilled over to secondary school enrollments, which more than tripled, rising from a modest 2,937 students in 1951 to just under 10,000 in 1957.24
Increased enrollments, however, were not enough for the CPP in the advancement of its educational program. As elsewhere, education carried with it a range of intersecting political and social agendas. Among some in the colony’s local and expatriate anticolonial circles, a two-dimensional picture of the colonial educational system emerged. Writing, for instance, in his 1954 account of his previous year’s travels in the Gold Coast, Richard Wright flattened the complexities of Gold Coast colonial education and the histories of its alumni into little more than a prescribed set of programs designed to “guarantee that the educated young African would side with the British.”25 As exhibited in aspects of the Evening News’s coverage of the colony’s educational system, the party press at times appeared to sympathize with such portrayals of Gold Coast colonial education, praising instead the new opportunities opened by the Nkrumah-linked schools for both social mobility and for the cultivation of new political loyalties.26 Many Ghanaians themselves evoked not entirely dissimilar critiques of the colonial-era educational system during the period and beyond, arguing that it was clear that a change to the colony’s educational system was needed at the time. During a 2008 interview, for instance, longtime Accra resident N. Sifah, who was generally ambivalent about Nkrumah and the CPP’s legacy in Ghana, praised Nkrumah specifically for recognizing the deficiencies of colonial education and seeing that the “traditional schools—Achimota, Mfantsipim, and so on—were not enough.”27
Technological and scientific education was of particular importance to the educational revolution the CPP envisioned for the aspiring country. As the government would argue well into the 1960s, it was only via the attainment of the skills and knowledge embedded within a technically and scientifically oriented curriculum that the decolonizing Gold Coast could produce a citizenry equipped to meet the demands of nation-building.28 As a result, as outlined in its 1951 development plan, the new government emphasized the need for the extension of technical and trade education in the colony, focusing on subjects including “technology, agricultural science, commerce and industry.” Furthermore, opportunities to study in these new programs were to be open to students of both sexes.29 Even in the comparatively resource-poor Northern Territories, the plan also touted a commitment to scientific education in the region, emphasizing the recent installation of “science laboratories” in a new secondary school in Tamale. At the same time, the plan promised the construction of additional secondary schools in the region once more students became available.30 Meanwhile, on the national stage, an emphasis on student scholarships in fields including engineering and medicine would accompany the country’s enrollment numbers in the CPP’s 1957 presentation of its educational achievements.31 Four years
